Organizing Contacts for Mailings

Lawrence Rush

I'm trying to determine the best way to track contacts in our database. Currently, when we run receipts letters are generated for each contact that an organization has. It's inefficient, but helpful since we have multiple events throughout the year with contacts that change from year to year. Since our events repeat each year I was thinking about creating a contact attribute for each event. That way when it comes time to run receipts the correct contact could be pulled.


Has anyone else had trouble organizing their contacts? How did you manage it?

JoAnn Strommen

Have you considered defining by contact type for each event? If each event uses the same receipt it wouldn't work - you'd have to go with something else like attribute.  But I would assume receipt/thank you is specific to event.  If so, you can configure receipt function to pull contact by type in a hierarchy.  We do this to pull correct one for capital campaign vs. annual.


To keep it accurate, some of it will just require busy work of updating info from year to year.


Just one idea.

Christine Cooke 2

Lawrence Willim:

I'm trying to determine the best way to track contacts in our database. Currently, when we run receipts letters are generated for each contact that an organization has. It's inefficient, but helpful since we have multiple events throughout the year with contacts that change from year to year. Since our events repeat each year I was thinking about creating a contact attribute for each event. That way when it comes time to run receipts the correct contact could be pulled.


Has anyone else had trouble organizing their contacts? How did you manage it?

I have seen it done a few ways, slight variations on a theme.  The suggested, that I was taught, ideally, it is have them Contact Type marked with Primary, Secondary.  But in some situations/Orgs that is not enough.  And if you have several different contacts that all get info for different reasons, then yes, having Contact Type that relates to specific events or activities (such as grant prosposals and/or reporting), then those types should be utilized.  You can then set up in your Ack letters to pull particular Contact Types for particular letters.  This, as mentioned, is assuming that there is a different letter for each event, which there should be, one would think.

 And yes, this will take constant upkeep, because contacts are always changing.  That is a challenge for all of us :-)

 

Gina Gerhard

You can also use Contact Attributes --

• We have our Contact Types defined simply as Primary, Secondary, Other and use these for broad/general mailing purposes
• For more specific purposes, we use contact attributes - including coding the Gift Acknowledgement Contact.
  • The only downside for using attributes is that they are not really visible on the relationship screen.